If I connect a NAS to the internet, and I have 0.5 Mbps (0.0625MBps) upload speed, it would take years to transfer 1 TB of data.

Not exaggerating. I want to take minutes not years to transfer massive amounts of data wirelessly within my home network. Will the speed of data transfers within my local network be affected by my internet connection speed?

Data transfer between a NAS and a host occur over a network, and speeds are typically limited by that network. Thus, answering your question relative to the data transfer rate limits of the network between the NAS and the host (your LAN) is a reasonable answer to your question.
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mpez0Apr 24 '11 at 3:32

mpez0 I do not understand how that answers my question, specifically.
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aaaaaaApr 24 '11 at 3:38

3 Answers
3

Within your home on the same network? No. You'll be limited by the slowest component, which is likely to be the wireless network. A common 802.11g WLAN operating at 54 megabits per second has a theoretical max transfer rate of 6.75 megabytes per second. At that speed 1 terabyte will take 1.8 days to transfer. Wireless overhead will typically make it take 20-25% longer.

If you change to standard 100 megabit LAN (wired) you will get 12.5 megabytes per second, which is about 24 hours theoretically. Wired overhead is about 10%.

If you use 802.11n, you can get a little over 100 megabit speeds, typically, but overhead and the nature of wireless will still cause it to take longer than than wired LAN.

If you change to 1 gigabit LAN (wired) you will get 125 megabytes per second, and your transfer will complete in about 2.5 hours, but at these speeds you're likely to hit the memory cache limits of your computer and transfer limits of your disks. Wired overhead is about 10%.

If you change to 10 gigabit LAN (not available on consumer grade equipment) you could get 1250 megabytes per second, and a 1 terabyte transfer would take about 14 minutes. At these speeds you will need a dedicated disk array to keep up with the network connection.

If you want "to transfer massive amounts of data wirelessly within my home network" as you say, then LAN is exactly what you want. The fact that it's a NAS is irrelevant if all the devices are connecting to your wireless router without going through the Internet to some other location. There is nothing special or unique about NAS traffic which would increase or decrease the speed.
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Bacon BitsApr 24 '11 at 3:22

The two speeds are essentially unrelated. Data will be transfered over your local network at the maximum speed supported by the slowest component. So, if you have an 802.11g (Wireless-G) router, then the maximum theoretical speed of your network will be 54 Mbps. In reality, you will get slower transfer speeds, since interference can affect WiFi and most consumer-grade wireless hardware doesn't actually transfer data that fast. However, it will be significantly faster than your internet connection speed.

Data transfers at the speed of the slowest intermediary device. So, if the data you're transferring never traverses your internet connection then the speed of your internet connection will have no impact on the transfer.